Newt's Challenge: What's His Selling Point?
What's the most important quality in a president?
Over the past 15 years, conservatives have often emphasized character.
The nomination acceptance speech Mark Helprin wrote for candidate Bob Dole in 1996 was a hymn to the vital importance of good character in a president.
I do not need the presidency to make or refresh my soul. That false hope I will gladly leave to others. For greatness lies not in what office you hold, but on how honest you are in how you face adversity and in your willingness to stand fast in hard places.
Character was the answer conservatives again emphasized in 2000, with George W. Bush.
As Governor Bush himself often said, he ran for president in order to usher in a "responsibility era" in which people are "held accountable for the consequences of their actions."
Character loomed large again in 2008, as we again and again cited John McCain's personal heroism in captivity.
Other conservatives at other times have emphasized ideology: having the right answers to important questions.
Thus, Norman Podhoretz wrote in praise of Sarah Palin in 2009:
[S]he seems to know very little about international affairs, but expertise in this area is no guarantee of wise leadership. After all, her rival for the vice presidency, who in some sense knows a great deal, was wrong on almost every major issue that arose in the 30 years he spent in the Senate.
What she does know—and in this respect, she does resemble Reagan—is that the United States has been a force for good in the world, which is more than Barack Obama, whose IQ is no doubt higher than hers, has yet to learn. Jimmy Carter also has a high IQ, which did not prevent him from becoming one of the worst presidents in American history, and so does Bill Clinton, which did not prevent him from befouling the presidential nest.
As Newt Gingrich seeks the Republican nomination for president, he faces the problem that both these traditional grounds are unavailable to him. The character argument takes him places he does not want to go. The ideology argument invites opponents to remind primary voters of Gingrich's surprising history of ideological unorthodoxy.
So what are the grounds for a Gingrich candidacy? Basically 3: intellect, experience, and ideas.
Nobody questions Gingrich's smarts.
Gingrich has lived longer in Washington and been more involved in more Washington debates than any other candidate in the 2012 mix - vastly more.
And of course Gingrich is a famous ideas factory.
Gingrich's challenge is to persuade his electorate that those 3 grounds are features not bugs in the context of a cycle where smarts have been ridiculed as elitist, where experience has been dismissed as unwelcome, and where ideas are constrained by a jungle of ideological taboos.
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